The reliability and security of data is important to the everyday operations from personal, business, and governmental perspectives. People want immediate access to their data. The ability to quickly access data can be improved through the use of a cache. A cache, such as a flash cache, is a type of memory that is typically quicker to access than some other types of storage. As a result, data stored in a cache can be accessed more quickly than the same data stored on a slower storage device.
In fact, flash caches are becoming a common component of storage systems to accelerate the performance of the storage system. Thus, the performance of the storage system is improved with the addition of a cache.
The reliability of the storage system can be provided by ensuring that the data is backed up or by employing strategies that provide redundancy. By backing up the data or by providing redundancy, data that becomes corrupted can be recovered from the redundant copy. For example, a backup system ensures that the data is protected at a certain point in time. If the source or original data becomes corrupted, a valid copy of data can be recovered from the backup. Other types of redundancy such as RAID systems can be used to recover corrupted data. However, this can be a relatively slow process and time is needed. Although these types of recovery systems provide reliability, systems and methods are needed to reduce the time required to recover corrupted data.